PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

PhotoShelter Brands, Islandora, Razuna, Piwigo

Side by side on what we have verified on each vendor’s own pages. Where a fact was not checked, the table says so rather than leaving a blank that reads as “no”.

What decides it · Runs on your own servers

If the files genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, this is not a close race — the platforms marked No below should not be on the call at all.

PhotoShelter Brands

No

Islandora

Yes

Razuna

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

PhotoShelter Brands
Islandora
Razuna
Piwigo
Verdict
A DAM platform for brand and marketing teams, built for real-time camera-to-cloud photo and video distribution during live events.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A flat-fee-per-account DAM and MAM with a free 500GB/5-user tier and unlimited paid users, for teams willing to pilot without much recent independent review evidence.
A self-hosted, permission-based photo/video catalog with album hierarchies, tagging and a large plugin ecosystem, for archives and small orgs willing to maintain their own server as the library grows.
Price published
No
No
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Plan tiers differ by number of Library (admin) seats and storage (TB); unlimited invited/contributor users on every tier. No dollar figures published — all tiers show a "Get Pricing" CTA leading to a sales/demo form.
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Flat price per account by volume; the vendor states there are no per-user fees
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
Yes
Free trial
No
No
Yes
Yes
Transparency index
Not checked
Not checked
90%
100%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Not checked
On-premise is available only in the enterprise tier, whose price is not published
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026

“Not checked” means exactly that: we have not verified it, not that the platform lacks it. Every other value was read off the vendor’s own pages on the date shown on each platform page.

What to ask on the demo

One question per platform, drawn from what actually goes wrong with it — not a generic checklist. Vendors run the demo; this hands the agenda back to you.

Razuna On-premise is available only in the enterprise tier, whose price is not published — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.